


My Debit to Pay

by Jadedphase



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Finn POV, Gen, Set post season one, character death - mentioned, somewhat AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-15
Updated: 2014-06-15
Packaged: 2018-02-04 18:04:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1788160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jadedphase/pseuds/Jadedphase
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Finn, Octavia, and Bellamy are the only ones left, so far as they know, and have found their new home across the ocean.<br/>But even with war and bloodshed behind him Finn cannot find peace until he knows he has paid a debit to those the Earth took from him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Debit to Pay

My pen has nearly dried away where the ink no longer leaves more than a scratch on the rough parchment, but still I try to scribble the words upon that surface. I want this record to be remembered, I want the lives captured within these simple phrases to carry onward past the days and nights when their eyes fell shut the final time on this strange soil that they tried to cultivate into a culture. A society carried up the shoulders of children their own skyborne civilization cast away.

A world built upon rebellion and youth, crafted through will and hope; scattered upon the wind by the cruel nature of an Earth that had no patience for their fledgling attempts to live amid the forest and alongside each other.

It feels like forever past when in truth it has been barely years that I have been without them, since I have seen the far side of an ocean that looked endless to my naive eyes.

 

Long months without the blonde-haired warrior that led us, she captured my heart in her unwitting hands and held it, so briefly but so strongly. And the fool that I was then, unable to understand that love burns brightest when it is unsteady and desperate; too late I let the glow in the dark slip away and she was gone.

Because she was power, she was resolve and she was the strength that so few of the rest of us could find inside; she was the one who could save us all but could not save herself from the same doubts even the best of us suffer in the dark nights when finding our way is made even harder knowing that even we are so very, very fragile.

I miss her with an ache that feels like needing the sunlight upon my face, knowing that I will no longer see the light of that day. That I could not have even if things had been different; the sun seeks the moon and thus her heart was chasing one other than myself.

 

I saved him for her, the irony ended up being that he was the one to travel with me in the end, and now he still carries a wound in himself that she put there. He is no longer the same, still strong but something is broken; his dark eyes hold the clouds of stormy waters inside and he wishes, I know he must, that he had somehow found a way to stay behind.

But he is too needed, even here in a place of peace his sister still depends on him and it's just enough to keep him here. One day though it will no longer be, when she is busy with her own family gathered around her and no longer the child he still sees in her he will make the trek back to see what he can salvage on the far shores where we first tried to carve out a world for ourselves.

And I may join him, if nothing more than to prove to myself that the ones who haunt me are laid to their proper rest; I owe them that. I owe them more than my words can give, too weak to carry the weight that was each of those lives, each of the friends I had lost years ago.

 

There is another, tawny skin and hair like autumn silk that slipped through my fingers in warm nights; she made me a better person simply by knowing her.

She took away the safety, bold and lovely, wise beyond her years with a lifetime lived in her short handful of time. Where I needed answers she was there, loyal and gleaming bright, because above everything she was stronger than any flicker of doubt or moment of chaos. She took away the fear around her with a smirk and a laugh; she could move the world if she had the tools to do it, and sometimes without it.  
And I don't doubt that if she hadn't given her all and the last of herself for the sake of others she would have been a pillar in that new world we were so eager to piece together; she was a force of nature to those against her with a gentle hand to those who needed her.

And her gaze, fiery and deep as the ebony night, it still lingers before me in my most painful dreams of loss; I gave her up when I should have held onto her with all my might.

Did she ever forgive me for breaking her heart?

 

Did any of the rest forgive me? For accepting they were gone and running to the safety we could find, our tiny little group of three led by a man we had to trust because this is his world more than our own. And I do trust him, because in the end he saved what he could not out of spite towards those who rejected his pleas against those battles but because he knew the right path was not the one of blood.

He and I have more in common than I would have assumed, this earth borne man of quiet resolve and insight; on my best days I hope to follow what he would have to teach me.

But these words are for those gone, not for the brother and sister, the sister's companion, or even for me, the world-weary soul trying to capture the past before it slips away from me.

 

And sometimes on my worst days I think back and laugh, at the memory of one who gave us all a sense of hope in the heavy nights, clumsy and faltering but so earnest that it was nearly like watching a heart break each time we suffered a loss because it sank so deeply into him. I'm not certain any of us felt the sting as acutely as the most unlikely of the entire lot; the one we underestimated time and time again until he showed us all the real strength buried inside and waiting for the chance to shine.  
The stumbling spark we all needed, the one who had to be needed to find who he was; and he was so easily a brother to each of us and proud of the chance to be. I cannot imagine how the world we were building could have been half as fair without him there to remind us of what was important in needing each other.

His scars were ones we all shared but he alone carried on his skin, in a way it felt like he carried them so that the rest of us would not have to; even if he didn't know that himself.

 

But thinking of one without the other would be impossible, the same as our own unconventional guide spoke of memories tied with another my memories of the both of them are so often wrapped together.

There was a real truth to friendship there, if only the rest of us could have found that with each other maybe things would have been different, if nothing else than for the sake that our spirits would have been too strong to crush.

 

But I miss him, with his wisdom offered softly and understanding that went beyond what even I expected; he was an eased soul in the chaos. We should have learned more from him than we did, I should have learned more; but the days were too swift and he was our elusive sage without even being aware of it, he kept us alive in a way that did not involve guns and blood.

What he could see with such ease in the trees and grass around us most of us did not even understand in those days, we only knew faith when he assured us that if we would only try to use what the Earth was giving us we would have enough.

If only there had been more time, or he could have reached this place with us; he would have found a home I think, one that he would have settled into with such ease. Because I think, of all of us, he was the one who belonged here the most; some part of him was already connected to this place before he ever took the first steps out of the shadow of steel.

 

So many more, some days I almost lose count of each face and name, but I have written letters to the dead for so many that even if I lose them they at least know they meant something.

I did not expect to be one of the few still alive in the end, to be the one offering gratitude for what they taught me simply by being a part of my own life and helping me along the road I needed to travel. In them I found love and the pain of its' loss, friends and brothers; a family that I write the legacy of now on faded pages of parchment to let them know, somehow, that they have not been forgotten.

If I had never known them I would have lived my whole life through lost, never as real as I could be and never as grateful as I feel when I shut my eyes and they join me in dreams sometimes closer to memories; and those are the best nights for me.

I write these words to them because they are gone and I am not, I owe them for what they have given me and even more I owe them the chance to exist forever in some tiny way; not nearly enough but all I can give. When my pen has finally ceased to work and perhaps I travel back to the shores I fled years past maybe then I will finally feel my debit is paid.

But if it is not I will find another way; I understand now that this world is not built upon stone anymore than it is upon the drums of war; it is constructed on the memories of those who still give me a reason to find hope.

This is their legacy, and I will see to it that it does not die with them.


End file.
